In this paper, we introduce backscatter communication for power-limited sensors to enable long-range transmission in wireless sensor networks, and envision a way to avoid doubly near-far problem in wireless-powered communication network (WPCN) with this technology. In backscatter based WPCN, users harvest energy from both the signal broadcasted by the hybrid access point and the carrier signal transmitted by the carrier emitter in the downlink, and then transmit their own information in a passive way via the reflection of the carrier signal using frequency-shift keying modulation in the uplink. We characterize the energy-free condition and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage zone in backscatter based WPCN. Further, we propose backscatter based harvest-then-transmit protocol to maximize the sum-throughput of the backscatter based WPCN by optimally allocating time for energy harvesting and information transmission. Numerical results demonstrate that the backscatter based WPCN increases significantly the transmission range and diminishes greatly the SNR outage zone.